Benefits of Taking Creatine Before and After Workout

Taking creatine before and after workouts or anytime you want works to increase and improve muscular storage as a form of energy called creatine phosphate (CP). Creatine Phosphate plays a very important role to produce the energy needed for short-time and high-intensity exercise. To put it simply, taking creatine before and after a workout increases your muscular storage of Creatine Phosphate to boost up your energy system. This boosted up energy system helps you to put up with the most difficult and intense workouts in the gym. Let’s explore the overall benefits of taking creatine before and after workouts.

What Is Creatine?

Creatine is a nitrogenous organic acid (amino acid) that naturally exists in our muscles to fuel them. It facilitates the recycling of adenosine triphosphate (ATP). ATP is the energy currency of the cell of the muscle and brain tissues. Creatine supplement is the powdered edible form of amino acid that is taken by the body-builders and the gym goers to boost up their ATP. Creatine supplement can be mixed with drinks. There are also some creatine pills that can be taken without any drink.

Benefits of Taking Creatine before and after Workout

Creatine supplement adds to the existing creatine of your muscle to gather more energy for high-intensity exercises with the rowing machines, dumbbells, bench press bars, etc.

Taking creatine before and after workout decreases the possibility of quick exhaustion during the high-intensity exercises. The increased muscular endurance prolongs the depletion of the phosphocreatine.

Creatine regenerates the energy level quicker. It means a greater recovery and enhanced storage of creatine in your body that will keep your energy level up.

It also increases your strength and the rate of force development.

Best creatine supplementation improves your sprint performance. It will keep the balance of your steady like the beginning between the sprints.

It also improves your agility performance and increases your leg power during cycling.

It provides you with a greater strength improvement in the back squat and bench press exercises.

It also increases your performance in team sports that require extra energy such as football and rugby.

Creatine supplementation helps your muscles look filled and brimming by drawing the water into the muscle cells. This water drawing makes your muscles look energetic and bustling.

It pumps up water into your muscle cells and makes them look larger almost within overnight sometimes. Consequently, it causes cellular swelling that can increase your muscles’ protein synthesis. To simplify it, creatine not only makes your muscles appear larger and stronger overnight but also make them larger and stronger in the long run.

When to Take Creatine?

You can take creatine before and after a workout or whenever you want. The time usually does not matter that much. However, when you are going to the gym, it might be the best idea to take the creatine before and after workout. On the rest days, you can take it whenever you want. Different studies have given different results about when to take creatine. Most studies have shown that taking creatine after a workout yields a better result. However, you can take creatine both before and after working out.

How to Take Creatine

The assistant professor of exercise physiology at the University of Oklahoma, Chad Kerksick, Ph.D., recommends that users create a mix of fruit juice and 100% pure creatine powder. The juice contains sugar that increases the insulin level to help accelerate the creatine uptake into the muscle.

Exercise physiologists say that you need to add 70 grams of simple sugar for every 5 grams of creatine in a drink. They also suggest that you add 60 grams of carbs per 100 grams of creatine supplement.

You can also take some creatine pills without any drink, but it’s better to take the powdered creatine with juice.

What is the Best Creatine?

The powdered creatine works better than the creatine pills. The quality of the powdered creatine depends on its dissolving feature. If the powder is hard to dissolve, it’s of poor quality because it mixes other substances with it. Good quality creatine will dissolve fully in the water.

In the end, you might have already started thinking that creatine alone can make your body large and powerful but that is not the case. You must add workouts with taking creatine. So, taking creatine before and after workout will make your muscles larger and powerful.